A Closer Look

Sapphire's fansink uses a copper base and five heatpipes to keep the GPU cool.


On the front of the card an extra heatspreader has been installed to cool secondary components like voltage regulation circuitry and memory.


The card requires two 6-pin PCI-Express power cables for operation. This power configuration is good for up to 225 W of power draw.


The HD 7950 comes with AMD's dual BIOS feature that was introduced with the HD 6900 Series. It provides a safety net in case a BIOS flash goes wrong; simply switch to the second BIOS and flash back to the original BIOS.


For voltage control the card uses the CHiL CHL8228 chip, the same model found on the regular HD 7970, which means that software voltage control should be working with existing software.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Hynix, and carry the model number H5GQ2H24AFR-T2C. They are specified to run at 1250 MHz (5000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


AMD's Tahiti graphics processor introduced the GCN shader architecture, it is also the first GPU to be produced on a 28 nm process at TSMC. The transistor count is 4.31 billion.